So You Get Ideas In the Car And Don't Want to Die

May 8, 2019

One of my very best friends has a great saying “There’s no dying in xyz” and I firmly agree with her. The topic today is “I get ideas in the car and I forget them / I don’t want to die trying to write them down”. A friend recently referenced this and this is my approach to this. I also have a teenage son who is working on his license. And while I will tell him “phone in glove box while driving”, I’m also realistic enough to know that he might not follow that. And perhaps this will help him also.

The safest approach is to use your phone’s voice recorder. But the key thing is to move the voice recorder app to your home screen. It can’t be buried on the fifth page of icons.

Put your phone’s notepad on your home page. And then trigger voice to text when you get in the car. This way if you don’t talk, it doesn’t type anything. But it can sit there, waiting patiently for you.

Get a phone mount which attaches to your car’s dash. I used to think these things were absolute crap – until someone made me get one and then it was like “how the hell did I live without this?”. Happily the simplest, cheapest phone mount I’ve seen is also fantastic. Even if you’re not actually typing, you’d be surprised at how much this can help you.

Put a pen and paper in the car. Technology sometimes fails. Or we’re on a call and we can’t switch contexts to use an app. Often just a jotted down keyword or two is sufficient to capture the memory.